This is
familiar territory, explored here before http://invectiveagainstswans.tumblr.com/post/24683335676/number-13-hercules-buildings-lambeth
. I walk past the site of Blake’s house in Hercules Road at least once a week,
and I have even named my little press after that address. Indeed, I’ve been
resident in Blake’s patch, first across the park in Southwark, then in Lambeth
itself, for 17 years. There is something about the cosmic pull of south – as
Chris pointed out during our walk, it was (and in some ways still is) a place
of non-conformity, raising a fist towards Parliament across the river. It was
the location of circuses and pleasure gardens, music halls and ale houses,
‘seedy pleasures’, as Stanley Gardner has described them.

We started,
of course, where Blake’s house at Number 13 Hercules Buildings once
stood – and Sophie told us something I didn’t know (no matter how long I live
in London, there is always something new to know). She mentioned a strong man
in Philip Astley’s circus named Hercules (Astley’s mansion, Hercules Hall, was
down the road from Blake’s house). Doing a bit of Googling, I found the site of
Astley’s Ampitheatre on Westminster Bridge Road https://londonstreetviews.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/astleys-royal-amphitheatre/.
The site also tells us that the ‘strong man’ in question was Andrew Ducrow,
originally from Belgium, who was able to
lift a table with four or five children on it with his teeth. His nickname
was ‘The Flemish Hercules’. Ducrow is a familiar name to me, as his grave is
one of the most spectacular in Kensal Green Cemetery, more circus ring than
mausoleum.

But back to
Lambeth. We crossed Hercules Road, past the horrible new Crown Plaza hotel that
has risen like one of Blake’s terrible serpents and now dominates the block
opposite. It was this (and a drawing by Alison Gill, a constructivist
composition of cranes and scaffolding) that prompted my poem, recently featured
in Tom Bland’s online journal Blue of
Noon

We proceeded down Centaur Street and then Virgil Street – a
grimy, dirty conflation of streets running off Hercules Road under the railway line,
dotted with pigeon excrement and graffiti. But also, for those who take the
trouble to seek them out, some stunning mosaics based on Blake’s illustrations.

We walked up to Lambeth Palace, and along the
river to Westminster Bridge, then back to Vauxhall, finally ending up in the
Blake room in the Tate. During the day, Sophie asked us to find the ‘textures’
of London, rough and smooth. Chris asked us to find our ‘own William Blake’ in
the landscape. And suddenly, everywhere, there were poems in trees and signs
and pavements.

For
me, one of Blake’s most moving statements about London is his poem of the same
name, which was written while he was resident in Hercules Road. During our
session, we discussed Blake’s use of the word “chartered”, a term from banking
and business, which still feels modern in the age of property deals (I know exactly
what Blake would think of the hotel taking over the end of his road …). It
begs the questions ‘Who owns the streets’? ‘What rights do we have as city
dwellers?’ Blake’s insistence on ‘every’ in the second stanza shows that in his
London, everyone is a stakeholder,
from man to child, but the stanza resolves itself by having them all in chains.
The churches are blackened, from the chimneys of new factories belching out
smoke, and the palaces have blood running down their walls, from the deaths of
soldiers called to fight in the French Wars. And the human drama continues: the
harlot’s ‘curse’ is passed to her child, and to her client, who takes it into
his marriage bed, or ‘marriage hearse’, suggesting that what they all face is
an early death. The Harlot represents innocence ‘blackened’, like the chimney
sweep in the previous stanza. It’s a microcosm of his London, which puts me in
mind of Hogarth, who, although a very different kind of artist, shared Blake’s
concern for the London poor.

While
on our walk, the news flashed over our phones that Jeremy Corbyn has secured
the Labour leadership. I wonder what Blake would have said …